BAM

I’m always excited for dance performances.  They inspire me, send shivers down my spine and keep me stick straight in anticipation of what comes next.  That is unless they’re bad.  Then I get monumentally disappointed and feel ass though the life was drained out of me during the performance.  I went into the Bush Women performance kind of wary, trying not to get my hopes up too high and because of my fellow students doubt was permeating my usual enthusiasm. 

As the performance started I was intrigued but nothing glued my eyes to the stage.  There was a lack of coherence, that new age “dance to the music you feel, not what you hear” style throwing me off.
Then the dances and dancers slowly came together, built up a story and took off with it.  When they all started working together with the audience I became enthralled.  I could find the story and I appreciated their movement so much more.  Their limbs were sentences and torsos paragraphs.  Their hands took the music and molded it into life.  I hadn’t been able to concentrate on the dance through the music before hand, yet as the dance came to a crescendo, I found the music through the movement.  As the story took shape the performers brought out benches and stools as props, and used them almost as other dancers.  The objects moved with them, set the stage and accentuated the lighting that set the scene for each story told by each dance.  Both the lighting and the props had distinct purpose, a reason to be onstage, just as each of the dancers did.  That is what made the performance worthwhile.  Each person had a reason to be on stage, to be telling their story, lifting their bodies higher then their voices ever could go and telling a story for whoever was watching.